GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs Radeon HD 4870 1GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti has a GPU core clock speed of 900 MHz, and the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM runs at 1026 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is made up of 192 Stream Processors, 32 TAUs, and 24 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 750 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 900 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 800(160x5) SPUs, 40 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 550 Ti Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 4870 1GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 550 Ti	Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	March 2011	Jun 25, 2008
Code Name	GF116	RV770 XT
Fab Process	40 nm	55 nm
Bus	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16
Memory	1024 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	900 MHz	750 MHz
Shader Speed	1800 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1026 MHz	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	192	800(160x5)
Texture Mapping Units	32	40
Render Output Units	24	16
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11	DirectX 10.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 3.0
Power (Max TDP)	116 watts	150 watts
Shader Model	5.0	4.1
Bandwidth	98496 MB/sec	115200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	28800 Mtexels/sec	30000 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	21600 Mpixels/sec	12000 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.